Dr Dilantha Gunawardana is a molecular biologist, who graduated from the University of Melbourne. He moonlights as a poet. Dilantha wrote his first poem at the ripe age of 32 and now has more than 1700 poems on his blog. His poems have been accepted/published in Forage, Kitaab, Eastlit, American Journal of Poetry and Ravens Perch, among others. He was also awarded the prize for "The emerging writer of the year - 2016" in the Godage National Literary Awards, Sri Lanka for his first collection of poems (Kite Dreams – A Sarasavi Publication), while being shortlisted for the poetry prize. Dilantha is a dual citizen of Sri Lanka and Australia, and shares his experiences from two different cultures. He blogs at - https://meandererworld. wordpress.com/

The sexual revolution, like a juggernaut,
Moves on, with no hope what so ever
Of stopping it or slowing it down.
So I step up, to sell marriage,
A haven, sacrament and institution,
And a sweet home to many.

When I say that I’m a non-conformist
I mean to say that I change in retrograde
In the complete opposite direction of change,
Everyone else embraces – the anterograde kind.
I look out of my two window panes,
I see the fall of Victorian dresses billow
Bigger than dinosaur bellies and gentlemen
Lift their hats every time a woman
Passes by. I see a little pact between man and woman, that is,
Undergoing both devolution and irrelevancy,
Like the corset, or courtesy,
Stubbornly resisting the inevitable,
Almost like the stones of Stonehenge,
Her timelessness endowing man,
With an offering of legitimacy,
Of an otherwise commonplace ritual
Of bed hopping.

And by design, falling in love,
Is simply developing staying power
To the custom of mounting beds,
When man develops that recurring feeling
– Sometimes a sheer constant – that the freedom
To walk away, is only negligible,
To the compulsive need to stay,
And occupy a room, both,
On the inside and out.

And in Austen country, there are
Those who cheer on this haven. The “Liz”s
And “Darcy”s, who have become sheer
Misnomers in modernity. Being a romantic,
Is far from policing your bodies,
Or being sentinels on guard posts.
It is the sheer pleasure in knowing the unknown
Is as mythical as the dream prophesizes.
How beautiful to have another
At the caressing distance of a breath,
Gold orbiting like rings of Saturn,
In that near-perfect moment,
Butterflies start to settle on your skin,
While beneath, a tsunami wave is breaking loose,
About to engulf all in her corridor.
And all you can do is to resist, the resistance,
Just wanting to be washed away
As far as you can. How endearing,
Not knowing, what you’re feeling.
And still letting that feeling control you,
Till you exclaim; as your resistance,
Finally breaks,

And now, you are no longer a Jane Austen novel.
Just a page of Mills and Boon

There is no greater joy
Than that moment, a fledgling bird’s feet
Become adrift of the ground.
And learning not to feel anything
On your feet, is when, you
Find your wingspan and slowly,
You gather wingspeed,
And together, you become,
A specimen of ornithology with a keel,
Learning that the azure sky,
Has endless possibilities,
Just like when you are an offering
Of flesh, reaching out to another body,
To become entwined as a pathology,
Of time bridging to timeless,
When your body and hers,
Are persuasive anatomies
Loaning each other,
To spark something electric,
That has both a plug point
And a switch.

Stringed like a puppet,
We dance to the tune of our ancestors,
In an education that is passed on
From one generation to another.
We learn that crossing our legs
And wearing a chastity belt is a trademark
Of a woman, who believes in love,
To the extent of keeping her hull ready
To be broken by first water.
And that strain, which deprives, and yet
Sustains, lurking under lips,
Inside buxom breasts, or even between
Hip bones, is beautified, by the notion
That there is someone out there,
In this boundless wilderness,
Searching for you, your heart and then your flesh,
To become instruments of music,
Jukeboxes, gramophones, even CD players
Transcending altitudes imposed by octaves.
And when patience overrides lust
There is a beautiful unopened bud,
Which, only when spoken in nuptials, affirmed by gold,
And shared in consummation,
Opens her world, petal by petal, to be a selfless offering,
To the most selfish thing about man;
His singular need to culminate,
In corporeal democracy.

To every sanction or outright embargo
There is a counter-movement.
No one walks on the streets on curfew days
Yet teenagers still play cricket, down empty alleyways.
Embargos too, make life austere,
Except for contraband that is sneaked through mules
To a place, only the smugglers know.
And sanctions, just like the disciplinary orders,
Given by parents, never stop the girls
From holding the apples out
For the quarterback or the power forward
To pick, after a game.

Freedom is, more often than not,
A weapon for the rule-breaking hero,
Who has a larger than life existence,
Seemingly becoming on the bathroom mirror,
A somebody, that dethrones his childhood,
To grow up, to learn that out of all things,
Love entertains, flying becomes
Your summer, gifted with the heroic song,
Of thrust and triumph.